


The Lily Full of Sweet Perfume

by slattern



Series: The Seeker Who Sets Out Upon the Way [8]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Ancient Mesopotamian Poetry, Anti-Imperialism, Aziraphale and Crowley in the Ancient World, Bathing, Cosmology, Crowley is an anarchist, Current events are influencing author, Episode: s01e03 Hard Times, Genderfluid Crowley (Good Omens), He/Him Pronouns for Aziraphale, He/Him pronouns for Crowley, Hellenism, Imperialism, Inanna - Freeform, Jungian, Life After the Apocalypse, M/M, Modernism, Multi, Patriarchy, Psalm 139, Psalms, She/Her Pronouns for Crowley, Slight Canon Divergence, Symbolism, The British Museum, The Hebrew Goddess, The Serpent - Freeform, The Talmud, Tigris and Euphrates, Uruk - Ancient Mesopotamia, after armageddon, bathhouse, history of consciousness, post-modernism, the body swap
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:06:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27197575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slattern/pseuds/slattern
Summary: It's a new reality, the other side of the apocalypse. But how can we be together, after the End? Maybe we have to go back to the Beginning.Crowley’s watched enough romantic comedies - streaming, cinema, opera, miracle plays, hieros gamos in the temples - to know exactly what she's doing. It's not their beginning, but it's one of the first things she can remember, consciously. And so she’s walking across the shiny floor, her leather oxfords silent, and comes to slouch in front of a display holding an assortment of unremarkable reddish clay tablets.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: The Seeker Who Sets Out Upon the Way [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1571059
Comments: 21
Kudos: 19





	The Lily Full of Sweet Perfume

**Author's Note:**

> _As on a heap of rubbish cast upon the highway the lily will grow full of sweet perfume and delight, thus the disciple of the truly enlightened Buddha shines forth by his knowledge among those who are like rubbish, among the people that walk in darkness. Dhammapada 59_
> 
> UPDATE: Now with gorgeous fanart created by the astoundingly talented [laurashapiro](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurashapiro)   
> 
> 
> Well, here it is, the beginning of the end.  
> Some content notes for this work include suicidal characters, egregious use of symbolism, shifting pronouns and presentations for Crowley. I'll update the tags as I go, but I made the rating E from the start although this first chapter is M at most.
> 
> If you've read the rest of my series you know it's not a ton of fluff, and this last story is definitely exploring some very heavy ideas and emotions. If you ever have questions about my work, feel free to comment or reach out on tumblr, I'm lavraiemonchichi. You can also see all the related posts I've made under the tag #the seeker who sets out upon the way 
> 
> Enormous gratitude to my beta readers; [laurashapiro](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurashapiro/profile) for extensive inspiring conversations, idea massaging and relentless encouragement, and to [ tyrograph](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyrograph/profile) for your indefatigable copy-editing and cheering.
> 
> To everyone who has read my stories, kudo'd and commented - and especially to the folks who've been rereading my work and commenting again in recent weeks. Thank you. It's amazing to get that appreciation when struggling with writing, and encourages me so much.
> 
> If you're in the United States, please vote.
> 
> _“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be..._  
>  This is the inter-related structure of reality.”
> 
> ― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Song of the Chapter: [Lizz Wright, My Heart](https://open.spotify.com/track/4zY2l24eh1b8SAIxvxyeHy?si=24M8IbvtS-CwGp5mb6eHMg)

_to turn man into woman  
woman into man  
are yours Inanna_

_allure ardent desire  
belongings households  
are yours Inanna_

_life vigor fitting modesty  
male guardian angels  
female guardian angels  
disclosing sacred spots  
are yours Inanna_

From _Lady of the Largest Heart, Poem for the Goddess Inanna, “The Morning and the Evening Star,” by Enheduanna, High Priestess of the Moon God of the City of Ur_ , translations and commentary, Betty de Shong Meador

________________________

**London, a few weeks after the world doesn’t end**

It's funny, even to her, that she comes here, alone, to be soothed. Entering through an archway surrounded by (apparently perpetual) scaffolding, she wends her way around the clusters of tourists, the assorted, eternal complaints of travelers drifting past her ears in a polyglot of languages. Crowley speaks many of them, but not even she can speak them all, the myriad expressions of meaning the humans have developed.

"If I'd known what lunch would be like, I would have stuffed some yoghurts in my bag at breakfast." Russian, grumbled from one spouse to another, bringing up the rear of a crowd gathered at the gift shop exit. Laying her ears back, Crowley slides past the group and up the wide staircase, which is almost unpopulated. The halls remain unusually empty as she makes her way to the Levant rooms - where a slightly out of place vividly scarlet rope marks the (sudden) gallery closure - and steps over it to slip into the exhibit. The only light in these rooms are the spotlights in the cases filled with the pillaged detritus of civilizations.

Crowley’s watched enough romantic comedies - streaming, cinema, opera, miracle plays, hieros gamos in the temples - to know exactly what she's doing. It's not their beginning, but it's one of the first things she can remember, consciously. And so she’s walking across the shiny floor, her leather oxfords silent, and comes to slouch in front of a display holding an assortment of unremarkable reddish clay tablets.

He was so brave, her angel, really. Even as he’d been girding his loins to kill Adam, to shoot an 11 year old with a clumsy, but no doubt lethal, weapon, Crowley loved him. She wouldn't have loved him any less if he had done it. Crowley's not a pacifist, especially with literally everything at stake, but she's glad the angel doesn't have child murder to atone for. Bad enough to witness his guilt over renouncing Crowley, denied three times before cock crow, as it were.

So here she is, feeling a bit silly, truth be told. She slouches deeper, fingers stuffed in the shallow pockets of her snug dyed denim. She looks at the clay tablet, silent, sitting among its brethren. It's not the thing, anyway, not really. It's a postcard from another memory, an earlier one. One that was already ancient when she'd first come across this bit of clay, a hundred years or so ago, in the basement of this building.

________________________

**Mesopotamia, indefinitely long ago**

Slathered in thick, sulphurous clay, the demon lets out a sigh of contentment. He’s been lying on a rush mat in the inner courtyard of the bathing complex, baking in the sun for an hour until he’s almost immobilized by the dry, cracking mud covering every inch of his skin. When his bones are warm and his limbs tight in their shell of mud, he rolls slowly to his feet, sun-dazed and sleepy.

Sitting on a low stool by the fresh water trough, scrubbing the mud off like a discarded skin, fresh and glowing underneath, Crowley is revived. Did the humans learn it from him, the pleasure of taking off layers, of peeling, sloughing, uncovering the hidden, the revelations in the flesh? This bathhouse is a holy place, part of the temple of Inanna in this city devoted to Her, and Crowley has been welcome here since the Gods were even closer than they are now. The Creatrix speaks through the body made limp and glowing with pleasure, with wine and wheat and water, and Crowley’s conception, before time, was an act of that divine flesh; hands plunged in the soft earth, semen scattered across the sky, a red gash, wet and fruitful, birthing all the world.

After washing in the fresh water flowing through the low trough in the mudbathing courtyard, Crowley ties a plain linen wrap around his waist, deftly braiding his long hair, twisting it atop his head into a damp nest. He is feeling good. Very good actually, unusually so, even with all the pleasurable attention to his physical being. There are faint ripples in the warm evening air, like songbirds, or burbling water, or the music of tiny bronze cymbals on the fingertips of the priestesses. The chiming, liquid sensation is surrounding him, but it becomes more distinct as he wanders into the bathing room to soak in the hot pools. And that’s where the angel is.

Crowley doesn’t bother to conceal his delight, pausing in the cedar beams of the doorway to look on the angel. There’s something about this being, so like him, but different, that he wants to be near. Not even a human generation ago they’d met last, and the memory wells up of an evening at the edge of a quiet curve of the river, drinking some date wine, sprawled together as they talked, laughter floating down the current of the river as they passed the night. The angel - _Aziraphale_ \- seems happy to see him too, his hesitant smile spreading wide as Crowley returns it. He’s broad, and soft, the plentiful hair on his chest, his limbs, beneath his belly in the vee of his legs, is tightly curled in the warm, moist air. Crowley can just make out the pink heft of his member. He’s not sure if the other has always had it. He thinks not. There’s a scent to him, a timbre to the music in the air, that’s shifted, arrived.

"Oh! Hello there!" The angel, although obviously pleased, is stiff and awkward. Despite being naked, cherubic rolls spilling over the tiled edge of the pool, his avoirdupois relaxed and steamy, Aziraphale manages to convey a sense of flustered anxiety reminiscent of a culture not yet remotely in existence. He's settled on the edge of the mineral pool, legs dangling, and he fidgets them under the demon's gaze.

“Well! I didn’t know you went in for this sort of thing.”

“This sort of thing?” The angel’s got a sharpness in his voice and his fidget stills. Crowley likes the bite of it.

“You know…” Crowley drawls, gesturing around the large room, steaming mineral pool in the center, sun streaking through the open beamed roof, broken by the shadows of sheared palm leaves; at the tall clay jars of oil for bathing and massage on their raised platforms against the wall, at the woven mats of fresh, springy reeds for lounging and napping, and the cool jugs of barley and emmer beers sunk into the shaded earth.

“Oh, yes well, the corporation does have certain demands, doesn’t it! I wasn’t completely prepared to be honest. It’s remarkable how what is necessary is made so pleasurable. Brilliant design, don’t you think?” The angel stoops, hand cupped, to scoop some water from the pool and drip it over himself, his knees, the cushion of his lap. His face has an indulgent, contented look. [1]

Crowley's mouth curls for a moment, not anticipating this sudden, sensual equanimity. In another moment, he realizes Aziraphale is talking about the Creator of the human corporations, not the clever inventors of the bathhouse. Well, fair enough. So he understands the creation of pleasure, appreciates it, seeks it out. This seems like an excellent basis for a long term friendship, which Crowley would very much like to have as he walks the earth.

Aziraphale continues to drip handsful of water on himself, kicking his feet gently, just under the waterline.

“Have you done this before, angel?”

“Well, no, actually, and the instructions aren’t terribly clear.”

Crowley has crossed the room now, and drops to a crouch at the edge of the pool, next to Aziraphale.

“Then I’ll have to show you. You’ve no idea what a good bathing will do.” He’s tempting the other of course, tendrils insinuating, tasting the air. There’s an underlay to the angel, a complexity the humans can’t match. Crowley wants to show him how to do this, how to care for his body and use the delightful human tools to care for it, to feed it with pleasure. He wants to be _inside_ him, in a way that is like and yet so unlike what he feels with the humans he’s coupled with. Crowley wants to _know_ the angel.

“Come out and stand by the wall, you need oil.” Aziraphale cocks an eyebrow, but makes his way to his feet, stands dripping and solid, naked, for a moment, before mincing across the wet floor to retrieve a linen wrap, soon tucked around his ample waist and covering him to mid calf. The material absorbs water from the angel’s skin, is damp and clinging in ways that are even more intriguing to Crowley than guileless nakedness. After indulging in a luxurious look, which he’s not sure the angel knows to interpret, he gestures Aziraphale over to stand on a raised platform of polished wood slats.

“Put your hands up here against the wall.” There’s two patches at about shoulder height where many hands have rested while their owner was being oiled. Unselfconsciously, Aziraphale leans forward, his palms settling into the wall’s welcome. The thick strength of his shoulders and upper arms is prominent in this position. Crowley ladles olive oil from a tall clay jar into his cupped hand, which opens onto the angel’s head, running over and into his close cropped curls, small rivulets running down behind his ears onto his neck.

“I say!” Aziraphale gives a small jump of surprise at the cool slickness of the oil on his scalp, but doesn’t move his hands, even as Crowley repeats the action two, three more times, until his head and neck, back and chest, are soaked with oil and there’s drops in the mud around the wooden mat Aziraphale stands on. Then Crowley puts hands on the angel.

"Close your eyes. I have to rub it in now." The demon's brisk fingers are moving on Aziraphale's scalp, invigorating and strong in his hair. It feels wonderful, touching the angel. His head is warm, giving under Crowley's fingertips, hair silky, slippery with oil. Aziraphale is leaning into the pressure of Crowley's hands, and as the demon slides them down the short curves of the angel’s neck to his shoulders, he lets out a sigh. Crowley pauses to listen.

“Oh, that’s marvelous. I had no idea.” Aziraphale’s body makes a wiggling motion down his spine, sending the linen fabric floating around him for a moment. Crowley finds himself unable to speak. Apparently also unable to move.

“Oh Heavens, don’t stop, please.”

Crowley swallows, before finding his voice. “Hush and be still, angel. You’ll never learn if you keep interrupting me.” He must have put a little extra demonic ferocity into it; Aziraphale becomes relaxed and tranquil. Crowley’s hands move over his arms, each finger lifted from the wall and slicked with oil, inquired of. The softness of his triceps, grey fuzz in his armpits, Crowley’s hands find themselves everywhere. He luxuriates in the possibilities offered by this creature of compatibly expansive infinity; a fellow traveler, a friend. He’ll begin with the texture of his skin, each mole and mark slowly becoming known under Crowley’s oily touch. Aziraphale sighs and hums, like the doves in the cotes at the temple. Crowley wants to touch him forever.

And it feels like he does. Sun streaks through the open slat roof, into the dim bathing room, dust and steam giving the golden beams a radiant solidity. Crowley, touching Aziraphale, swirls through his own waves of arousal, seeing the angel swell and subside under the linen, the shifts in breathing, his warm, fat sounds. There’s moments of building, of pressure, but mostly Crowley basks in a detumescent fog of well-being. This feels good, he thinks. This is what good feels like.

Hands on Aziraphale, rubbing the planes of muscles, the occasional harder point of a bone under padding, divots and valleys of tenderness and tension revealed under his fingertips. It’s far beyond the brusque oiling needed to clean one’s corporation. But what is it to be a demon if not excessive? Crowley lets his eyes close as he drops into a squat, hands up under the linen wrap to run over the angel’s buttocks, palms splaying down the breadth of his thighs, backs of the knees. Fingers slip between the tendons cording over the top of Aziraphale’s wide feet. Crowley uses both hands to lift each angelic foot, like he’s grooming a horse. To touch each toe with oil before planting the sole carefully back on the mat. Then he stands, to begin again at the top, neck and shoulders, with a rough fold of cloth that leaves the angel pink and scrubbed, striped with drifts of grey skin and oil that have been rubbed free.

Eventually, hazily, Crowley accepts that he’s finished, and draws his hands back from the angel. He stands, unmoving, eyes closed in a slack face, and doesn’t stir until Crowley lays a hand on him, squeezes his shoulder.

“Isn’t that just the thing?” Aziraphale’s words are slightly slurred, and Crowley feels a stab of something. Protective? Possessive? He wants to wind around the angel until every bit of tender flesh is subsumed, surrounding him so only they breathe the small, secret air between their mouths in the dark.

Instead he drops an oily hand to the angel’s back, fitted between his shoulder blades.  
“Let’s get you in the steam.”

Aziraphale is gratifyingly pleased with the delights of the steam room. The embers in the hearth produce vast quantities of fragrant mist, resinous with cedar. Crowley guides him to the hot water trough, rinsing his skin to dewy newness, and a final revival in the cold plunge. They finish the afternoon on the roof of Crowley’s house, eating figs, black and sticky. Crowley has wondered since:, if he’d known then, how long it would be until he would touch Aziraphale again, would he have done differently? Reached for the angel over the platter of figs, offered one to his lips, followed it into Aziraphale’s innocent mouth with his fingers?

But he hadn't done that, and in the next few thousand years, the angel had changed, stiffened, sealed up. By the time they arrived in Europe, the open-pored sensualist of the bath house in Uruk seemed no more, or at least Crowley's sulphurous hands were unwelcome. It would take almost all the way to the end for Aziraphale to acknowledge that he had been different once, and could be again.

________________________

**London, 1902**

Crowley's dislike of the Victorian archeologists was visceral, instinctive. Bloviating know-it-alls blessed with nothing but an accident of birth and a consuming greed to devour and despoil the world. There was no single-handed alteration of the earth’s rotation for Crowley, she wasn’t a God. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t interfere with their ‘discoveries,’ their ‘translations,’ and their ‘acquisitions’ - better named looting, despoiling and theft.

She was in the basement of the Museum, an enjoyable haunt for both fucking shit up and the occasional nostalgic bit of tchotke shopping. And it was fun to skulk around in this longline corset, broad hat with layers of melodramatic veils, black and white kid boots with shining black buttons disappearing under her skirt. If anyone saw her, well, the museum was bound to be haunted, wasn’t it? A bit of occult glow helped that misunderstanding along if needed.

She was dragging her hand over the top of wooden crates, nailed shut, stamped with crests and instructions. Papyri in this one, a hundred scrolls at least. A quick snap over the box and every barley talley and self-impressed bureaucratic report was amended to a discussion of the very active sex life of Teti-Hor-Nub, a priestess of Amen-Ra whose flexibility and insightful observations deserved to be known through the ages. The fusty curators would keep them locked away for now, but eventually they’d make it into the light. And in the meantime, well, there’d be plenty of embarrassment and arousal warming up starched collars in the museum back rooms, to Crowley’s delight.

Sweeping her hand over the next shipment arouses an unexpected tingle. It smells like hard baked clay, and when she pries open the crate she can feel the divots of cuneiform under her fingers before her eyes even adjust to read them in the dark. From the library at Ashurbanipal, the king who collected the clay and wax tablets that were already ancient in his reign, some generations after the flood. One very small panel draws Crowley’s hand. There’s the faintest glow about it, lying there in straw; a smell, a taste that’s known, a chime of cymbals. Freeing it from its burlap wrap as she lifts it, the demon knows as soon as she sees the writing bared. Aziraphale wrote this. Perhaps not that very day in the city on the river, but at that time. Crowley knows it, she heard it later, many times of course, but these precise few lines of faded, ancient angelic gold in a museum basement are a message from the past, just for her.

There’s no real translating it, the writing is indecipherable, and she knows Aziraphale must have about a thousand versions in the bookshop, though none of them sounds quite like this.

_When I sit down or stand up you know it; you follow my thoughts from afar._

_You see my walking and reclining, and are familiar with all my ways._

_Not a word comes to my tongue but that you know it well._

_You touch me before and behind; you lay your hand upon me._

_It is beyond my knowledge; it is a mystery; I cannot fathom it.[2]_

Crowley sits on a crate of Etruscan funeral urns, turning the tablet over in her fingers. _“I cannot fathom it.”_ Thousands of years later, Aziraphale still couldn’t fathom it, being adored, loved for all his ways.

It takes a little more dynamite than the papyri, but Crowley bites the tip of an elegant finger until a red drop swells there, then snaps her fingers wetly, hissing at the sting. There’s a flare of gold and silver lights around the tablet and a smell of baking bread. The cuneiform is gone, replaced by a slightly harried looking snake-tongued demon, sketched into the clay.[3] The words of the tablet are for her alone.

**Author's Note:**

> [1]I couldn’t quite fold this into the text, but I found this discussion in the Talmud where R. Hillel is stopped by his students on the way to the bathhouse and he asserts that we should definitely bathe and anoint ourselves and eat delicious foods, because that is how the Gods are treated (ie dressing and bathing and feeding of statues of their Gods by other peoples), and we are created in the image of God. Literally we are commanded to bathe in the bathhouse. Big Aziraphale Energy from R. Hillel here.
> 
> _"The merciful man does good to his own soul (Proverbs 11:17)," this [refers to] Hillel the Elder, who, at the time that he was departing from his students, would walk with them. They said to him, "Rabbi, where are you walking to?" He said to them, "To fulfill a commandment!" They said to him, "And what commandment is this?" He said to them, "To bathe in the bathhouse." They said to him: "But is this really a commandment?" He said to them: "Yes. Just like regarding the statues (lit. icons) of kings, that are set up in the theaters and the circuses, the one who is appointed over them bathes them and scrubs them, and they give him sustenance, and furthermore, he attains status with the leaders of the kingdom; I, who was created in the [Divine] Image and Form, as it is written, "For in the Image of G-d He made Man (Genesis 9:6)," even more so!...[Vayikra Rabbah 34 ](https://www.sefaria.org/Vayikra_Rabbah.34.3?lang=bi)_
> 
> [2] I have slightly altered the grammar of Psalm 139 to make it more personal. Many of the psalms along with other poetic portions of the bible are or contain themes of love and erotic longing directed towards the deity (The Song of Songs is the most well-known example). This type of erotic devotional, finding a model for our longing and devotion to the Source in our yearning for our earthly lovers, can be found in religious traditions all over the world. 
> 
> [3]This is an [actual piece](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/demon-sketched-2700-year-old-tablet-was-thought-cause-epilepsy-180973901/), although it is not in The British Museum, but was recently discovered hidden on a tablet in Berlin’s Vorderasiatisches Museum


End file.
